The iconic Washington Dulles Airport Marriott has at least a few more years of life before being imperiled by potential redevelopment.
Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) board members voted Wednesday (Aug. 19) to extend the lease on the 21-acre hotel site at 45020 Aviation Drive for two years, until Sept. 30, 2029.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed at the meeting.
MWAA agreed to the extension as it continues to evaluate future uses of land to the north of the airport’s terminals. The site at 45020 Aviation Drive is slightly outside the scope of the renovation plans currently being proposed by MWAA’s board and pushed by the Trump administration.
“The proposed extension will not impact potential new development construction timing, should the Airports Authority pursue redevelopment of the subject land area,” Stephen Stoycos, vice president for real estate development at MWAA, said in a presentation to the authority’s Business Administration Committee.
The history of the lakefront hotel dates back to 1967, when Marriott signed an agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration to operate a hotel on the airport grounds.
The property opened in 1970, and in 1987, the federal government handed over control of Dulles and Washington National airports to the newly created MWAA.
Riller Dulles LLC, a subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Riller Capital, acquired the lease from Marriott in 2019, according to Loudoun County property records. Riller continues to operate the property under Marriott branding.
While not directly connected to the airport, it is the only hotel located directly on its grounds. In addition to 368 rooms, the hotel offers about 13,000 square feet of meeting and event space.
Given that the extension is for just two years, the current leaseholder represented the “only practical source” for reaching an agreement, Stoycos said.
The extension is contingent on Riller Capital maintaining the facility’s affiliation with a leading hotel brand.
While its architecture is familiar to the millions of travelers through Dulles over the past 56 years, the hotel has no historic preservation protections. It is not part of the National Register of Historic Places, Virginia Landmarks Register or Loudoun County Heritage Register, and even if it was, those programs don’t provide safeguards against redevelopment.
Marriott’s name has adorned the hotel since its opening on April 15, 1970, but the company wasn’t the first to obtain the operating concession.
Then-company president J.W. Marriott Jr., told The Washington Post prior to the opening that another, unnamed firm initially won the contract, but failed to go through with its project. Marriott got the deal on its second try.
Initial planning called for a hotel that ultimately would expand to 500 rooms. But the Marriott opened with 125, seemingly enough for an airport in a still-rural area that many residents of the D.C. area would’ve described at the time as the boondocks.
During 1970, Dulles recorded about 2.2 million passengers, compared to 27.3 million in 2025.
Despite more than a decade of slow growth at the airport in the 1970s through the 1980s, Marriott officials had faith in their gamble.
Opening day activities included the ceremonial plunging of an oversized key for the hotel’s front door into the adjacent lake. The message being delivered, a Marriott spokesman told The Post in 1970, was that the firm anticipated the hotel would be “open forever.”
